Other Monsters
by Right What Is Wrong
Summary: Rose, sole survivor of the original Dragoons, was forced to become the Black Monster for the sake of humanity. In other worlds, the sole survivor still takes on that duty; however, that sole survivor may not be Rose. /AU oneshots/ Chapter 4: Damia.
1. Kanzas

Chapter 1: Kanzas

He laughed in the old woman's face, of course.

He was never some noble-hearted fool. What did he care if the world burned? He only cared for glorious slaughter.

( _And for-_ )

Thus spitting in her face, he flew from Ulara, and reveled in the blood he so loved, caring nothing for any cause. The battles against the Winglies had given him great fun. That was all. They had been fools enough to want to enslave _him_ , and so he had broken first his collar and then their necks. If the God of Destruction crushed the whole world for nothing more than a laugh - he could only sympathize, and find it amusing that Soa himself had created a god in his image. When that time came, he would go to his own death with nothing more than a savage grin.

It was for the best, anyway. With the Wingly empire gone and no truly impressive fights left, he would get bored.

( _And the light went out of the world with-_ )

He could draw matters out, at least, by abstaining from his Dragoon form.

It let his victims _pretend_ they had a chance.

She came to him, one night, in radiant disapproval.

He leapt to his feet and struck before she had a chance to speak. His fist went right through her.

"As you may have noticed, I died," she said dryly. It sounded so much like her - as it would if some Wingly witch were impersonating her.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are!" he spat, jumping back and looking around. With a moment's concentration, he assumed his Dragoon form, but even his enhanced senses could not detect the magician.

"What are you... Ah." Her shining form closed its eyes. "Kanzas, I'm no illusion."

"Ha! As though that isn't what an illusion would say?" He shot into the sky and surveyed the ground below, but could detect no trace of life save for his latest kills. "Come out, damn you! I tire of this."

She appeared beside him after a moment, the edges of her form wavering like a candle in the wind. "There is no one to find." She seemed to give a heavy sigh, but there was no sound of breath. "It is me, Kanzas. Merely... dead."

"Right. Like those specters in Mayfil?" He gave a barking laugh. "Wingly trickery! Why should I believe in such nonsense? The dead stay dead! And I make sure of that."

They had done a very fine job; they had even gotten that tired, drawn look just right, that look she had whenever he disappointed her.

( _That look that made him comply, however grudgingly, like a trained dog-_ )

"You should believe me," she said after a moment, "because you yourself are little more than dead, Kanzas. And you know it."

He was thunderstruck for a moment, but then let out a roar of laughter. "Me? Dead?" He spread his arms and laughed some more. "I'm more alive than I've ever been! Look to those witless hunters - or should I say, _hunted_ \- down there, if you want to know _dead_." He gestured downwards and chuckled. "I'm free of that mindless Campaign, of all of Zieg's _leadership_ , of Diaz's _great cause_ , and I can kill and kill and kill as much as I please." He grinned like a wolf. "What more could I want?"

Her wavering form eyed him with unimpressed pity. "You kill to hide, even from yourself, that you have no purpose to live." The indifferent pity deepened in her eyes. "You always did."

He punched her again. It was no more effective than last time, and the sight of her eyes gazing down the long line of his arm at him disturbed him. He withdrew it, and caught himself wiping off imaginary contamination, like a superstitious child. Snarling, he glared at her; this was beneath a Dragoon! "Enough playing, magician," he snapped. "Come out and face me, if you dare!"

"You know it's me, Kanzas," the specter said, in the tone one might use on a superstitious child. "No amount of denial will change the truth. You only hope there's a magician, so you can lose yourself in slaughter for a little longer, and forget..."

"Forget _what_?" He pounded his fists together. "Don't attribute weak feelings I don't have! I fear nothing!"

"Except emptiness."

He tried to laugh, but it died in his throat. He coughed and glared at her instead. "Emptiness? What is this nonsense?"

"You cling to your dolls like a child, and slaughter like a child's game, but you're not Michael, Kanzas." She gazed at him with infinitely tired eyes. "Violence alone does not suffice for your life. If it did, you would have never agreed to fight for our cause."

"I needed to kill," he said carelessly, glancing away. A moment later, she was staring him in the face again. He blinked rapidly and looked in the other direction, shutting his eyes this time. If she was a mere illusion, the magician could get a free shot at him. Her look - disturbed him, in a way he was not used to being disturbed. "That was all. You lot were useful allies." He forced a laugh. "Even I might have been hard-pressed to kill an entire Wingly city by myself."

" _Kanzas._ " He jerked at her tone - what was he, _truly_ a child? - but did not open his eyes. "You joined us because you wanted something more than endless, empty slaughter. You know you did."

Silence hung in the air for a long time. At last, he wet his lips. If there was really a magician somewhere, listening, he would make their death _long and slow_ after what came next. "Shirley... I didn't do it for them."

Her voice was soft when she spoke. "I know."

He opened his eyes. She hovered at the edge of his vision, but didn't force herself into view. He was grateful for that - how pathetic. "Especially not for that whining, slobbering, child-petting, smiling, goody-goody, mewling fool Belzac," he added.

"He was everything you weren't," she said. "He could have chosen your path. Easily. Nevertheless, he chose to protect, rather than..."

"Why, that's funny. You're dead, aren't you? And all those precious children - they'll die, too. By Soa's decree. And he can't do anything about it, because he's dead. So what was the point?" He glared at her, and then stiffened. "Is _that_ what you're here for?"

"Gathering myself... was difficult." She closed her eyes. "I... would have preferred to rest. At least, for a little while longer." They opened again, as lovely as in life.

( _And her approval, no matter how brief, was like the sun-_ )

"But I could not. And you understand why, don't you?"

"Get Belzac to do it for you, since he's so wonderful." He looked away again. "Oh, that's right. He can't, because your fine _protector_ died failing to protect, and you're having to beg the _killer_ to do his work, eh?"

"Kanzas. This is beneath you."

"Nothing is beneath me." He laughed, but it turned hollow as he realized the import of his words.

Perhaps she had a point.

"It's not about what Belzac would have desired - even if he would have also desired this." She paused, as though taking a breath. "It's what I want. I don't want the world we fought for - all of us fought for - to end."

He continued to avoid looking at her. "I'm not Michael. Am I some Vassal to simper and crawl at your whim?"

( _yes_ )

( _always was_ )

The silence stretched on uncomfortably. He was about to speak, just to break it, when she replied. "No, Kanzas. Ultimately, it can only be about what you want."

He glanced out of the corner of his eye at her, and his mouth twisted in a scowl. "I'll consider it," he said, voice bland and bored. "Playing along with Charle's little game every century - why not indulge the old biddy? Besides - that's an eternity for me to kill." He grinned broadly, just to provoke a look of disgust on her face. Apparently death had lessened her readiness to rise to bait, however; her flat stare only made the smile lessen, then disappear. Bah. As though he cared... "It's only killing, anyway. That's what I'm good at..."

( _That, and nothing else-_ )

She bowed her head. "I can only ask that you try."

He jerked his head. "No promises."

And with that, he was off, shooting through the sky.

"Impressive illusion, you bitch."

The old witch looked absolutely baffled at his greeting. "Illusion? Whatever do you mean?"

"Never mind," he said, ignoring the lurch of his stomach. "I've decided I was bored. I'll play along with your hundred-and-whatever-year game."

She eyed him carefully - probably trying to determine whether his bloodlust had given way to full-blown madness - but accepted it after a moment, and launched into her explanation of what needed to be done. It bored him to tears - righteous causes always had.

She probably wondered why, at regular intervals, he glanced over his shoulder. There was no good reason. Just boredom, and madness.

( _Somewhere, she was watching._ )

"Does this make you happy?" he muttered, eyes searching for a wavering sheet of light.

"I'm very sorry, Kanzas, but I didn't quite hear you," the perplexed Wingly woman said.

He made a disgusted sound under his breath and made a dismissive gesture as he turned back to her. "Nothing. Anyway, you were saying about this 'Moon Child' thing..."

Here he was, joining the Campaign all over again. Yet another senseless, virtuous cause - made for the bright and beautiful, not mad dogs like him.

But it was what Shirley would have wanted.

The approval he felt, and the faint touch on his shoulder, might have been his imagination. But it was a semblance of a brightness he would never otherwise know, and so he would take what he could get.


	2. Belzac

Chapter 2: Belzac

Winglies killed children. It was what they _did_.

His hands - those hands _she_ had praised as so strong, yet so steady - were shaking.

He had thought Charle was different, but here she was. A Wingly was a Wingly. She was asking for more dead children - she wanted more dead children - the Wingly answer was always more dead children -

"Belzac, please." The monster reached towards him, her face contorted in a parody of kindly concern. But it was a lie, because, if she could have any feeling at all, _she would not have asked_ \- "I know it repulses you, but there is no other -"

" _Get away from me!_ " he screamed. "Get _away_ from me!"

" _Belzac-_ "

He fled her presence, the marble beneath him shaking as he ran. If he had not - but he would not kill unprovoked, even something like _her_.

The Wingly who had seemed so good, and yet proven a Wingly after all.

The children, the _children_ -

He could hear Kanzas laughing at him from the grave. _No better than me, Belzac! You'll learn to love the children's blood on your fists - Do you want me to teach you how to make the dolls? You'll be no different from me! And to think, Shirley thought better of you-_

The thought of that sickening monster, that _beast_ he had forced himself to tolerate for the greater cause, nearly made him sick on the spot. And he _should_ have been sick. This was sick, to its very core.

He had fought for a world where no children needed to die. He wept and he retched, and he retched and he wept. He wished Shirley were here, and yet he was so desperately, shamefully glad she was not. It was better not to live to see this. He wished he had died with the others. He should have been dead. Perhaps his spirit was trapped in Mayfil, and this was some hellish Wingly torture. It had to be. To tell him he had to murder _babies_ in their _cradle_ , or else the whole _world_ would die -

It was the antithesis of everything he had ever done. They had fought a bloody war, and they had often not been proud of it. But it had been so that there would be no more deaths from the Winglies _ever again_. So that everyone could walk free. So that every child, no matter how poor or unfortunate, would at least never know what it was to exist under the lash, and die never having lived. So that the dead, however horrible their time among the living had been, could see a just future, and know their lives had been avenged.

And now he would be the Winglies' executioner, and cut down children and their protectors, endlessly, over and over and over again until the day of the world's ending.

He was exactly what he had fought to eradicate from existence.

As he exhausted the last reservoirs of his tears, he at last became aware of his surroundings. He was far from where he had been, and the Winglies were all staring at him. They kept a wide berth, as though he might go berserk and slaughter them at any moment - but he would not. That was not his way. But it was the Wingly way, that love of murder, and he supposed he could expect nothing else from them.

And he was a slave again, and a slave he would be forever. He was pathetically glad Zieg could not see this, that firebrand of liberation. And spirited Rose, and wise Syuveil, and sweet Damia. Not even Kanzas.

And Shirley, oh Shirley, oh Shirley...

He gave a dry sob.

Cradling his head in his hands, he saw the feet of an approaching Wingly. But he would not look up, and those feet came to a stop before him before their owner spoke.

"Belzac." That lying, traitorous voice sounded so saddened. But it was a lie, a lie... "I am so sorry."

"Child-killer." It was spat with every ounce of strength he had within him, but he was broken, and it was a pathetic, feeble whisper of what it should have been. He let out another dry sob.

"Yes." Shame - but there was not enough shame in all the world that would have sufficed for this. "If there was any other way..."

"The children, the children, the children..." He gave a great groan. "I _hate_ you."

"I know," said the liar. "I cannot blame you."

The children, the children... Why, Soa, why? The Winglies _were_ more perfect, then. More in a horrific god's image... And perfectly in the image was the God of Destruction, the child who would kill the whole world... "Hate. Evil. Monster..." He coughed and looked up at her, her face distorted by his own tears. "For the children," he said. "For the sake of all the other children, who would die..."

"Yes." Her head was bowed, but could a Wingly feel remorse, or solemn, or anything at all? He would have said so, an hour ago; now, he thought they were as he had always thought, before he had broken his chains and fled into the territory of the Earth Dragon, preferring even death to further service of the murdering masters. But they had only lured him into complacency, he now saw, only to forge chains far more terrible than before.

The children, the children...

"I am sorry, Belzac," the monster said. "But we have no choice."

He swallowed hard, and choked back another sob.

If there was anything still to be thankful for in this world, it was that Shirley was not here to see this.

"I know," the slave said. "So - do as you must."


	3. Syuveil

**Author's Note:** This chapter brought to you by "Space is Dark" from the album "The Grim Roper", which can be found on YouTube.

Syuveil is somewhat OOC in this one, though my excuse is that the forefront of a war is the _last_ place a man with a philosophical horror of death should be.

###

Rationalizations came as easily as death.

#

Towards the end of the war, after his own close brush with death, Syuveil had been haunted not only by his own mortality, but that of all those he had killed. The civilians - yes, they were slavers, or the children of slavers, but did that make their pain any _less_ as they plummeted screaming from the sky? Were lives blotted out in a blast of Dragoon magic any less _lives_ than those blotted out in blasts of Wingly magic? Could they not be saved - might even a scant few slavers have turned abolitionist, had someone managed to _reason_ with them?

Such sentiments were not well-received from his fellows. In a cruel irony, Kanzas came the closest to aligning with his growing doubt - if only because he had an equal disregard for _all_ life. But even Shirley's kind eyes had turned hard as she lectured him on Wingly atrocities, and reminded him that there were _always_ defectors to Charle Frahma's radical faction. Those who had not had chosen their loyalties, no matter what their reasons, and those who turned a blind eye to monstrosity were to be judged along with those who had dealt it out with their own hands. Belzac's view of the world was far too black-and-white to even consider it, even had he not been influenced by Shirley, and Zieg and Rose...

There had not been many words spoken in that conversation, but the look in Zieg's eyes had spoken enough for ten debates. And though Rose had been outwardly calm, that _creature_ of hers had arisen and paced around him, and he had not liked how it eyed him without her calling it off.

Yes, he _knew_ his slavery had been easier than those of others, though he inwardly rankled at the furious epithet of "pampered, perfumed scribe" - had he not been beaten near to death when his increasingly paranoid master took offense to some "look in his eyes"? Had he not watched friends tortured to madness, then torn apart, for suspected discussions with dissidents? Was that not _enough_? - but how did personal attacks detract from his _point?_ Even if the Winglies themselves had constructed the hell-pit of Mayfil, did that make the condemnation of a single soul to that darkness any worse - even if that soul _were_ a Wingly? Just because he had not experienced the worst horrors, was it truly just to answer horror with horror?

Damia might have heard him out... but Damia was dead. And so he was left to grapple with those questions alone.

He did not need to grapple much longer. The war ended. Everyone was dead, Dragoons and Winglies alike. Even Emperor Diaz, who cheering troops had once sworn would live forever.

Except him.

The war had been righteous; everyone said so, since all who disagreed were dead or had fled. Syuveil supposed that was a final enough answer. They were already characterizing his retreat from the world as a sagely decision to "meditate on the greatest mysteries", conveniently so vague as to be ideologically harmless, or as a heroic hibernation so that he might reappear in fine form to save them in "the time of their greatest need" - to kill and kill and kill whatever might oppose them, they really meant, he supposed. Never did they consider he might simply be... tired.

But what did he know? For they turned out to be right in the end.

Charle came to him not long into his retreat and, luring him into conversation with a scholarly discussion of the Divine Tree, soon revealed to him the exact _nature_ of the exploitation of the 108th Fruit. And the consequences of the shattering of her late brother's power.

The quickness of his acceptance of his resultant duties surprised her, that much was obvious. He'd seen the other Dragoons shooting Kanzas the same wary look that she gave him as she asked him if he understood the weight of that duty. But what she could not see was that his quick acceptance came from a place of numbness. What if he massacred a community or two a century for no other crime than gazing upon the wrong infant? How many had died when Kadessa came crashing from the sky - how many had not evacuated in time, confident in their emperor's might, or believed their parents' reassurances? How many infants had died in the siege of Deningrad? How many that he had known, slave and master alike, had died when proud Aglis fell in a single day and night of misfortune, plummeting from the heights of heaven into the depths of the sea?

What was another wash or two of blood upon his fine scholar's hands? Once it had dried, how would it be distinguishable from any other?

So he took up Charle's work, his mind filled only with nothingness.

That made him sloppy, at first. He let a few escape. And, with a scholar's precision, he marked what followed: the thralls of the Moon Child never shook off their enslavement, no matter whether they lived a second after its death or a century. Some took their own lives, unable to bear "that something of such beauty had gone out of the world", but others lingered: they preached the Moon Child's holiness and perfection, babbling of the perfect world it might have brought, and those who lived in the world, with no great oppressor but hunger and age and death, _listened._

Detached and benumbed, Syuveil could even find it a little funny: he recognized the personalities that formed the core of the Moon Child's cult, shades of Zieg and Rose and Shirley and Belzac, and understood that he had become to them what Winglies had once been to humans. Horrors that descended from the sky, bringing unnatural power and unmerciful death... Yes, amusing indeed.

He wept from laughter, nothing more.

But he understood how rebellions worked - he had studied the few unsuccessful ones before the rise of the Dragoons, so that he might discourse, at his master's command, upon why _this_ one would fail too - so he took the _requisite action_ when the cycle came around again, and armies rose to meet him.

There were no armies after that. _  
_

#

Sometimes, in the dead of night, he wondered if he had been on the right side during the war. The mists of time had softened Wingly atrocities, and his treacherous and weak human memory whispered that he had surely exaggerated how terrible it had been. Had he not plotted rebellion against his master? Had the masters not been right to fear all signs of unrest, after all? Had it truly been wrong to punish, horrifically or not, the crimes that would lead to the breaking of their race?

Was human rule so much better? Kings still ruled as masters, the poor still starved, and species still perished - precious Fruit upon precious Fruit, softly collapsing in on themselves and rotting into nothingness. And human understanding was so much less than it had been in the time of the Winglies: was freedom worth the loss of the old beauty, was liberty so precious when it was only the liberty to scratch for roots in the dust?

Those who died in the time of the Winglies had at least known for what they died. Those who died as he descended could not comprehend for what cause he killed them.

The Moon Child's power prevented that. He had tried to explain - he had _tried_ to persuade its cultists, once. They had only stared back with dead, dull eyes, and spat that if the world's salvation was the bounty of its death, they would have seen the whole world burn to save it.

It had not been murder to kill bodies whose free will had long since departed. But others... he had killed others, certainly... but not more than he had killed in the war...

And for what? So that he could mindlessly butcher the incarnations of a power that had once sustained an empire?

Charle swore she could not control it. Even during his lifetime, at the height of the Wingly empire, Melbu Frahma's gift and genius at soul manipulation was unequaled; in all the time that had passed since then, none had devised how to replicate his great work of capturing the God of Destruction's soul and sealing it within the Crystal Sphere. The Signets, ingenious and intricate though they were, existed only as extensions of his original system; with the original creation destroyed and its creator gone to the grave, they could only dampen the God's power, not regain control over it.

And if humanity's liberation had been the bounty of the Crystal Sphere's destruction, would it have been worth it for all of them to burn to save it?

Once these answers had been so clear; once the question itself would have been absurd. But centuries melted into millennia, and clarity melted with it. Syuveil had never been one to live in the present, and he drifted endlessly between a gilded past, bloodstained present, and barren future.

It did not affect his performance. He had matured past his initial sloppiness, and now he carried his heroism out without regard to squeamishness, philosophizing, or the souls consigned to nothingness.

His fellow Dragoons would have been proud.

#

Something itched at the back of his mind as he went through the mechanical motions of his duty.

Not the knights who desperately defended their infant princess, no. Dimly, he _remembered_ that he would have once admired their dedication, but the part of him that would have wept for them was millennia dead; all he felt, as he strode past their corpses, was the yawning pit where it should have been.

Not the cook, or the captain, or the crying nurse, no. Slaughtering the helpless was a way of life. Whatever dreams, whatever hopes, whatever gifts they might have had... all consigned to nothingness. Nothingness, nothingness... all so the world might not be consigned to nothingness... as though a blade might be washed free of blood by an ocean of it...

Not the Moon Child itself - it was the easiest, really. However endearing and innocent it might appear as it wailed in its crib, that cold, shining power that awoke as he attacked made a mockery of its _infancy_. By the time he fought his way through it and quickly, brutally ended the use of its vessel, the niggling itch had almost entirely left his mind.

But he always _was_ a pampered scholar without priorities, and so, as the _Saint Louvia_ sank into the sea, he hovered above it, regaining his breath, and tried to remember. There was something special about this time... What...

Ah, yes. The 108th Moon Child. His lips twitched, for all that he had ceased to laugh long ago. Was that truly all? A mere coincidence of numerology?

The other Moon Child incarnations had demonstrated no connection to the corresponding Fruits, and this one had displayed no abnormal behavior. Other Moon Children had been royalty - some even of Deningrad. This one was no different from the rest. No especial power, no especial base of followers. If anything, this one's followers had been more circumspect than usual - taking the Moon Child away before her royal mother could even lay eyes on it. Fortunate for Mille Seasau - it would spare them the turmoil of losing the entire royal family at once. Kingdoms which had sheltered other incarnations had not been so lucky.

He lingered for a moment longer, then shot through the sky, off to tell Charle that his work was done. As he had always done - as, apparently, he would do for eternity.

( _A man less benumbed by time might have realized the midwives would not immediately realize the child's nature, and wonder what fearful abnormality had caused the midwives to take it away before its mother had even seen it._ )

( _A man more aware of the present might have known of Mille Seasau's superstitious fear of twins, and the scurrilous rumor that the royal family had a history of them - excess infants that had been spirited away in the dead of night, their fates unknown._ )

( _A man still retaining scholarly curiosity might have remembered ancient speculations that twins originally shared both a single form and a single soul, and_ wonder _..._ )

( _But Syuveil did not._ )

( _But a man who stood and stretched his newfound limbs, luxuriating in the thousand little joys of a corporeal form and the silent screams of the human who thought it had_ vanquished _him, would._ )


	4. Damia

**Author's Note:** It's been a while. I may be rusty.

I never quite "got" Damia as well as the other Dragoons, but she was a Dragoon as well, and she deserves her piece.

* * *

Chapter 4: Damia

The world made no sense.

How had she survived when the others had died? How could someone as wise and careful as Syuveil have been killed by mere chance, a falling chunk of rubble in just the wrong place at just the wrong time? How could someone as fierce as Kanzas have given up before the might of a Super Virage, nothing left of his pride but his determination to take the foe with him? How could a couple as faithful, selfless, and unflinching as Shirley and Belzac have been cut down at the very end, after the last slaver stronghold was already falling from the sky?

How could Zieg and Rose, glorious, fearless, and invincible, have perished along with their mortal foe, bound together for all eternity only by their mutual burial in Kadessa's ruins?

And how could _she_ , a frightened, weak little girl accepted by neither humans nor mermaids, have lived when all of them did not?

It didn't make sense. She should have died _first_. If all of them had to die - she should have died first. Everything about her, from her troubled birth to her fragile childhood to her frailty even as a Dragoon, said she had always been destined to die young. All the rest - they had been invincible. They should never have died. Syuveil had been the second-frailest of them, a sensitive, gloomy soul whose mind seemed half in the hereafter... but he had feared it so much that she'd thought that, even if his spirit seemed not long for this world, his _will_ would keep him alive.

But it hadn't. He had been the first to die after all.

And then everyone who _shouldn't_ have died had.

She had shut herself up in her room in Vellweb, unable to join in celebrations that had been bought with the lives of everyone she loved, and spent most of her time pressed against the floor, eyes closed and mind numb to everything but the water around her. Had she been more human, she might have drowned herself. But she wasn't, and perhaps that was a blessing. She could lie here and forget about the world, about those who were gone, about everything that had happened, and her mind could become as still and clear and empty as undisturbed water, and it would be as though she never had been, as ephemeral as sea foam -

And then Charle came.

Charle, who told her she could lie beneath the water no longer. Charle, who told her she was still needed. Charle, who waited patiently until she arose and came forth, then told her what she must do.

Charle, who told her she would be lonelier than she ever imagined. Charle, who told her she would never see the other Dragoons again, that to go to where they were would cause the world's death. Charle, who told her she would spill enough blood to fill all the world's seas, all for the sake of there being a world at all.

She hated Charle.

Like a beaten dog, she loved Charle, for she was the only one there for her at all.

This child, through no fault of its own - this child, whose only sin was being born different, as she had been - this child must die, and all of its friends with it. The taunts of her fellow slave children, who sneered she should have been strangled at birth, rang in her ears as she did just that to another lonely, freakish infant, crying and crying with no one to hear its need.

Again. And again. And again.

That it had the power of the God of Destruction didn't touch her. She had her magic power, too, didn't she? Wasn't that why the Blue-Sea Dragon had recognized her as a worthy master, despite her age? How was this poor child different?

It hadn't chosen to bring about the end of the world. No one chose their birth. She hadn't chosen her birth - before she had become a Dragoon, before anyone had shown her any kindness, she had wept and screamed and wished she had never been born. This child, born over and over and over again, would surely have done the same, if it had the knowledge, if it had the choice. It always had friends, it always had those who showed it kindness - surely its heart would have been broken if had it known Soa's plan would leave it alive and all its friends dead. Surely it would have railed against Soa and wished to die.

That was the only way she could bear to carry out her duty - the knowledge, born of shattering experience, that it would choose to go to where its friends were. She could give it the mercy she had been denied. She could grant it the peace and stillness, and the absence of loneliness, that she would never cease to crave.

But only for one hundred and eight years at a time. Then it would be dragged wailing from the place where all pain had ended, Charle would come into her room, and their dance would begin again.

The dance that ended with one lonely, freakish child cradling the broken corpse of another, crying and crying with no one to hear her need.


End file.
